Bullshit Urbanism is a term coined by Dr Leon, who believes that wealth and power have made cities a joyless junk habitat that we can afford to support. Thus, capitalism is a significant cause of this predicament.
To learn more about Dr Leon’s concept and ways to break the stratification of cities through material accumulation, the Centre for Habitat, Urban and Regional Studies (CHURS), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute organizes a talk on “BS* Urbanism” under the Special Talk Series – #LocalGovernance
Mr Tikender S Panwar, Former Deputy Mayor, Shimla; Visiting Senior Fellow, IMPRI, commenced the session with a question- why bullshit urbanism? He gives context by talking about inequities in urban centres and the stark difference between rural and urban areas, evident from the Oxfam report on inequality.
He then introduces the speaker of the session Dr Leon A. Morenas, Associate Professor, School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi. Dr Leon starts his presentation by quoting his inspiration for the topic “Bullshit Urbanism”, which originates from a term coined by an American anthropologist and activist, David Graeber, in 2013 called “Bullshit Jobs”.
The term tried entangling the concept of employment being completely pointless, unnecessary, and pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case. Dr Leon finds this phenomenon fundamental and intuitive, which allows him to think that it’s not jobs that are pernicious and unjustifiable, but urbanism can be too.
An American writer, James Howard Kunstler, in his book “The Geography of Nowhere“, examines how during the epoch of stupendous wealth and power, we managed to ruin our greater cities, throw away small towns, and impose over the countryside a joyless junk habitat that we can afford to support. Dr Leon believed this was the beginning of the diagnosis of bullshit urbanism.
He saw the vitiation of the public as an uncontrollable force that destroys conventional categories distinguishing the urban from the rural and massive hydraulics of the urban system untamable and that bullshit jobs, as mentioned by David Graeber, to be life jackets keeping us afloat. However, the central concerns of his talk were not limited to material characteristics of the urban but, more importantly, the mutual construction of human beings and the built environment.
He then talks about how during the pandemic, the cities were not accommodative of caddies, delivery boys, labourers, loaders, cooks, painters, etc., who are part of the same population that helped us run the cities. Yet, they had to head back to their villages barefoot.
Urbanism, A fantasy Of Contemporary Capitalism
He then explains how both authors Kunstler and Graeber diagnose contemporary capitalism as the cause of our predicament. They thought capitalism to be too efficient, and yet there was a proliferation of bullshit jobs, which cannot be justified and economics. Thus, Graeber saw the need to study the moral and political ramifications of the same.
Dr Leon argues that bullshit urbanism is nothing but capitalism perpetuating itself by patenting of space, which is not driven by economic rationale but also moral and political reasons.
Metropolitan Dystopia
He then discusses his doctoral work, which looked at the technological undergirdings of the Delhi master plan, devised as a prototype for Indian development aimed at delivering spatial equality to Delhi citizens. However, he observes this spatial fix to have created a metropolitan dystopia of ever-increasing unevenness between the urban poor and metropolitan rich.
He then expanded his doctoral work to look into the social history of the smart city mission in India, which examined claims about data being empirical and non-ideological and the premise that algorithms analyzing data and smart cities are neutral and objective, demonstrating the fact that such arrangements and assumptions affect the poor disproportionately and deleteriously.
He emphasizes how 0.1% of the population controls 50% of the wealth, all without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such unequal social arrangements; for instance, some manage to turn their wealth into power over others or that other person end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The latter is the inevitable effect of inequality, and inequality is the inevitable result of living in any large complex urban, technologically sophisticated society.
Urbanism From A Historical Perspective
To view this problem from a historical lens, he takes us to a period before the invention of inequality. He states that homo-sapiens emerged around 200,000 years ago and existed as small mobile units of around 40 to 80 individuals, who worked for some hours, and there was no such formal structure of domination; thus, they existed as equals.
However, around 10,000 years ago, at the close of the last ice age, all changed. Neolithic farmers began cultivating crops as a result first settlement emerged. Then came private ownership of property, sporadic feuds, and war ensued.
Further, the production of surplus food allowed for the accumulation of wealth and influence beyond kinship groups and large concentrations of people, and the surplus of goods meant the natural emergence of inequality.
Anthropologist Marcel Moss, however, observed that our remote ancestors were behaving in broadly similar ways to the present-day structure, shifting back and forth between alternative social arrangements permitting the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of the year on the understanding that no social order was ever fixed or immutable.
He says that early homo sapiens were not just physically the same as modern humans. They were our intellectual peers who were more conscious of society’s potential than people generally are today, switching back and forth between different forms of organization every year. Our previous ancestors confined inequality to ritual costume drama constructing gods and kingdoms as they did their monuments, then cheerfully disassembling them once again.
In the city of Mohenjo-Daro, most of its population, around 40,000 residents, lived-in in high-quality housing, which lasted nearly 700 years. There is evidence that most of the city’s residents appear to have lived comfortable lives in brick-built of lower towns with grid-like street arrangements and remarkable infrastructure for drainage and sanitation.
In no evidence in the Indus civilization do we find any accommodation of sharia-type values, no tradition of monumental representation of pictorial narrative celebrating the deeds of charismatic leaders, and so on.
Thus, he concludes his presentation by refuting the myth that slavery, capitalism, and inequality were natural and inevitable features of human civilization earlier. Now, the bullshitization of urban spaces perpetuates these misconceptions and recasts them in benign terms of the planetary ilk.
Questions And Reflections
Dr Tikender remarked how intriguing Dr Leon’s presentation was and posed a question asking how he correlates to SDGs released by the UN that aim at making cities more equitable and what various works of different authors suggest, which is democratization or making resources accessible to everyone model.
Dr Leons states how the views of Harvey and Graeber are not compatible given their different political leanings. He views Marxism it’s as to how you deal with the city without having to deal with the state. He then talks about the mode of production, a concept of Marxism where if the proletariat were able to control the mode of production, then we could bring about real equitable change.
Whereas Graeber sees it not as a material production of the artefact but more about the social production of people, and therefore he advocates having an anarchist view and reimagining an urban scenario that is different and breaks the stratification of urban spaces through material accumulation.
Another question raised was, what is the role of technology in the new non-bullshit urbanism? And is it suitable and junctural to have a non-hierarchical world at this time and comfort?
Dr Leon answers by disagreeing that a non-hierarchical world is not suitable or attainable and justifies it with Graeber’s view of how anything that you are able to make, you can unmake and make them differently. Thus, he views that there are no cast stone structures that cannot be remade.
On the role of technology, he takes the work of Herbert Marcuse to explain how technology contours a person’s entire existence. He doesn’t see it to be a tool or instrumental, but something that should be approached with a larger vision and that cannot be pulled out in a cause-effect linear spectrum.
Dr Arjun Kumar, Director at IMPRI, asks how Dr Leon looks at the fast-paced urbanization of Chinese cities and his views on the same.
Dr Leon states how Chinese cities are fast-paced due to their capitalist nature, and from an architectural standpoint, he argues there are some formulaic applications and models of urban growth which, applied with proper economic backup, can be a success.
Concluding Remarks
He concludes his lecture by giving a gender lens and perspective on the topic. He emphasized how urbanism put women behind in some harems and would like to break this inherently possessed inequality.
Acknowledgement: Nikitha Gopi, Research Intern at IMPRI
Written by Nishi Verma